I wouldn't use the government hammer on people who produce proprietary software largely because I think it's quite clear that it's not needed. But people who produce proprietary software are doing a lot of harm that isn't strongly related to money.
I believe that proprietary software is essentially fraudulent because you are not really getting anything for your money. It's more that you're buying a service, and someone is handwaving about it being a good by making sure that you get a box and a disk or some other material good so you can feel like you really bought something. But in reality, you've bought nothing.
For example, many EULAs for proprietary software now stipulate that the 'vedor' can turn off the software remotely if you do something the vendor doesn't like. What other good that you buy can be mysteriously taken from you without a trial or any other sort of proceeding by the person you bought it from?
Free Software is the only honest software IMHO.
Personally, I don't like the term 'social justice' either. Because it seems like some sort of fuzzy ill-defined term that can be used as a justification for all kinds of evil things.
Then, perhaps, instead of being irritated over what they aren't doing, you can find a way to fill the gap yourself instead of badmouthing a project that's at least trying to do something useful.
Personally, I think OLPC has great potential. People seriously underestimate the ability of good communication to help people form and maintain communities. And having any sense of control over anything at all is very helpful for fostering a feeling that perhaps more things than previously imagined can be affected by your efforts.
I listened to someone who said that all the battles over proprietary control of information I thought were important were in fact pointless and something only geeks would ever care about. I believe that my friend has been proven wrong. It seems that the most important battles of this age are going to be over proprietary control of information, and that my values and ideals are proving to be important. I would've held them regardless because I thought them good regardless of how important they were.
And I think the same thing can be said of OLPC. I think a lot of people who call this project useless or stupid are mired in a way of thinking that will ultimately keep third world countries in their place forever. Anything that can give people a sense that they can make a difference, especially children, will have an effect that I don't think anybody can imagine.
That memo exemplifies everything I see wrong at Yahoo form my external vantage point. It's substanceless internal boosterism. "We're great! We're really great! I can't say exactly why we're great, but this is a fantastic company and all the rumors of our imminent death are premature because we're great!"
So, what exactly does Yahoo do, precisely, that's so great? Anything? I certainly haven't seen anything mentioned that they do at all well aside from possibly their financial stuff.
And while I'm sadly not related (or perhaps just not very closely related) to Grace Hopper, it's still neat that someone else with that somewhat unusual last name is in computing.:-)
I have a point system for what people think of when I mention my last name:
Dennis Hopper: Not that I dislike Dennis Hopper or anything, but mentioning a famous contemporary actor is just too easy and makes me think the person is likely someone who gets way more from pop-culture than they should. -1 point
Edward Hopper: Oooh, mildly obscure (as compared to, say, Leonarda da Vinci) painter who painted urban scenes from the 30s and 40s. Interesting. +1 point.
Grace Hopper: Found the first recorded real bug in computing. Inventor of the concept of a high-level language, responsible for COBOL, first woman admiral in the Navy... Wow! +50 points
Hopper: The grasshopper from Bug's life. No point value, but it does earn a very strange look.
There are actually very distinct classifications of pedophiles, and those distinct classifications have wildly different recidivism rates. Most sex offender laws actually explicitly recognize this and have a classification scheme based on it. But stuff like this MySpace deal completely ignore that classification scheme and treat all sex offenders the same regardless.
From what I understand, molestation within the family rarely strays outside, and it's uncommon that the offender does it again after (s)he's been found out. AFAIK, the scenario you paint doesn't reflect reality.
That's an interesting point. But who do you think would more likely to be on MySpace trolling for young girls?
I consider it milder mostly because it can sometimes be very hard to keep separate one kind of intimate relationship for another, especially if you were abused yourself as a child. I believe those cases are the ones most amenable to treatment. I also believe that the suicide rates among offenders in those kinds of cases are the highest. So, my definition of milder is mostly "least likely to actually be a danger to anybody else".
That's actually not true. The recidivism rate among sex offenders is very low compared to most crimes. And the likelihood could hardly be characterized as 'high' as I believe the rate is less than 1%.
Now, among certain classes of sex offenders this isn't true. But initiatives like this very rarely make any distinction and treat all sex offenders as the worst kind.
I can't see any reason not to make people like that register either. And having them show up on MySpace is just fine by me. Personally, I really hope that someone was very careful about things when they released them from prison.
I think most people would agree that kidnapping children and forcing them into sexual acts is worse than the statutory rape I cited or even a father molesting his daughter.
Sex offenders who violently take what they want by force might be worse than the kidnappers or not depending.
The statutory rape case IMHO hinges entirely on the individuals involved. I can see that being abusive or just fine. I, in fact, know of a case just like that in which both parties are now adults and are doing very well in a committed relationship.
And a simple stark reading of the charges someone is guilty of isn't actually sufficient to make a judgment either. It's all about intent, coercion, abuse of power and other factors.
I think we are in the process of creating a bunch of second class citizens with sex offender registration laws. People can become sex offenders for a wide variety of reasons, but everybody treats all sex offenders as if each and every single one were an evil predator lurking and waiting for even a glimmer of a chance to prey on a child.
For people convicted of kidnapping children and coercing them into child porn, this might very well be reasonable. But for the 25 yr old convicted of statutory rape of the 17yr old, this is quite questionable. Or the father who molests his daughter (and has never touched another child), or any number of other situations that are significantly milder.
Most people who have to register do not deserve to be treated the same as the worst of the class.
I'm waiting for the laws that strip custody of children from registered sex offenders or prohibit them from participating in school events with their children, or any number of other laws passed by well-meaning people that create a large class (probably nearly a million people in the US) of people who are denied some fairly basic things for no particularly good reason.
Well, OK, it says "The Novell deal was really bad, really really bad. It's good for Microsoft. What SCO is doing is good for Microsoft. The Novell deal is like the SCO deal because they are both good for Microsoft. The Novell deal is really stupid and Novell should know better."
And while I agree, nobody is going to be convinced by that. I would appreciate some deeper level of analysis and explanation. Perhaps something I could use when talking to people about it about why the deal is a bad idea.
Yeah, because enforcing the law against a big company is somehow representative of big government and corporate influence at their worst. We should just let monopolies run rampant. That way we'll have a really excellent telecommunications infrastructure and software that improves over time and isn't subject to massive world spanning security breaches and... Oh, wait... We don't have any of these things, despite having largely not bothered with monopoly law enforcement in those industries. Well... Hmmm... I guess that failed then.
Actually, I guess I disagree with your statement that it won't get Novell any more business. Though, I think in aggregate they will lose business for PR reasons, I do think there are a few businesses who will choose Novell because they think patents are an important consideration.
This is an interesting Real Politic analysis. And I think it is flawed in one important way. FOSS isn't about what a bunch of companies are doing. It's about what a bunch of developers are doing. This is a misperception many people have, and feeding it only serves to delay understanding.
This deal is good for Novell at the expense of everybody else. But, really, it's bad for Novell for that reason. Novell relies a heck of a lot more on software developed by others than its own software. It needs the goodwill in order to be able to move those external projects in directions it's happy with. Destroying that goodwill by entering into a deal that treats them preferentially is very, very bad.
They've tried to mitigate this by talking about getting Microsoft to promise never to sue individual developers. But what about RedHat? A good number of kernel developers work for RedHat. Those developers are now less inclined to help Novell.
So really, this deal represents a shortcut to getting what you want that will ultimately fail anyway.
I think there is overreaction, but I don't think it's to a ridiculous level.
The deal buys Microsoft nothing from a legal perspective. So, all the noise about patents is mostly about perception (which is all that problem is anyway) than reality. Novell screwed up majorly I think because they miscalculated and thought this would make the illusory patent problem better instead of much, much worse. The really irritating thing is that it makes it better for just them, but much, much worse for everybody else.
This also irritates the FSF enormously because it's a tactic that appears geared towards dividing people. And that's just evil by their definition and mine. They plan to make this kind of attempt to divide people a license violation in the GPLv3.
Now, some of the interesting bits involve Mono, J2EE and Novell's Exchange killer. I think these are all generally bad for the community as a whole. Mostly because Novell dropping work on the replacement for Exchange is bad for everybody. Since the details of the deal are not public, it's not possible to know if they did this as part of the deal or not, but it's a good guess that they did.
I really don't know what to make of the bits involving virtualization, Mono and J2EE.
Why not try to get the Russian government to cooperate in going after Russia based phishers, DDOS extortion rings and the like? It seems to me that would be a lot more useful to more people than asking them to shut down allofmp3.com.
Oh, right, the copyright cartel uses its ill-gotten gains to pay off politicians to do their bidding.
I think the direction the Tivo has gone with their hardware is ultimately bad for everybody, and specifically harmful to Free Software. It encourages all hardware manufacturers to make their hardware devices work in this way as it is more profitable to have detailed control over what your users do with what you 'sell' them. As an endpoint, this represents the effective death of Free Software as your ability to get hardware that will run it becomes increasingly restricted.
If Tivo wants to sell their devices at a profit, they are free to do so. There are many businesses that currently make a great deal of money selling people all kinds of hardware that doesn't have those restrictions in them. So whining about their ability to make money or run a viable business seems to me to be pathetic whining rather than a serious argument.
I run mostly free software. My one big concession is my Powerbook. My smaller concessions are games, which I think are more art than software and should be treated differently.
My workstation Linux box only runs proprietary software when I run certain games, and even most of the games I run are Open Source despite the fact that most of them have bad to mediocre art. My server Linux boxes run no proprietary software whatsoever. At one point I ran a Sybase instance for testing and development purposes, but I haven't done that in years.
My Powerbook runs the proprietary software that Apple distributes, but all the other software (aside from games) that I run on it is free.
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I wouldn't use the government hammer on people who produce proprietary software largely because I think it's quite clear that it's not needed. But people who produce proprietary software are doing a lot of harm that isn't strongly related to money.
I believe that proprietary software is essentially fraudulent because you are not really getting anything for your money. It's more that you're buying a service, and someone is handwaving about it being a good by making sure that you get a box and a disk or some other material good so you can feel like you really bought something. But in reality, you've bought nothing.
For example, many EULAs for proprietary software now stipulate that the 'vedor' can turn off the software remotely if you do something the vendor doesn't like. What other good that you buy can be mysteriously taken from you without a trial or any other sort of proceeding by the person you bought it from?
Free Software is the only honest software IMHO.
Personally, I don't like the term 'social justice' either. Because it seems like some sort of fuzzy ill-defined term that can be used as a justification for all kinds of evil things.
Then, perhaps, instead of being irritated over what they aren't doing, you can find a way to fill the gap yourself instead of badmouthing a project that's at least trying to do something useful.
Personally, I think OLPC has great potential. People seriously underestimate the ability of good communication to help people form and maintain communities. And having any sense of control over anything at all is very helpful for fostering a feeling that perhaps more things than previously imagined can be affected by your efforts.
I listened to someone who said that all the battles over proprietary control of information I thought were important were in fact pointless and something only geeks would ever care about. I believe that my friend has been proven wrong. It seems that the most important battles of this age are going to be over proprietary control of information, and that my values and ideals are proving to be important. I would've held them regardless because I thought them good regardless of how important they were.
And I think the same thing can be said of OLPC. I think a lot of people who call this project useless or stupid are mired in a way of thinking that will ultimately keep third world countries in their place forever. Anything that can give people a sense that they can make a difference, especially children, will have an effect that I don't think anybody can imagine.
Yes, that explains perfectly why the parent was modded down and none of the comments where I used that construct were.
That memo exemplifies everything I see wrong at Yahoo form my external vantage point. It's substanceless internal boosterism. "We're great! We're really great! I can't say exactly why we're great, but this is a fantastic company and all the rumors of our imminent death are premature because we're great!"
So, what exactly does Yahoo do, precisely, that's so great? Anything? I certainly haven't seen anything mentioned that they do at all well aside from possibly their financial stuff.
I think unusual, uncommon and rare are part of a rather ill-defined spectrum. I would call your last name rare, not unusual.
The parent was moderated as flamebait? Why?! *looks confused*
*chuckle*
And while I'm sadly not related (or perhaps just not very closely related) to Grace Hopper, it's still neat that someone else with that somewhat unusual last name is in computing. :-)
I have a point system for what people think of when I mention my last name:
There are actually very distinct classifications of pedophiles, and those distinct classifications have wildly different recidivism rates. Most sex offender laws actually explicitly recognize this and have a classification scheme based on it. But stuff like this MySpace deal completely ignore that classification scheme and treat all sex offenders the same regardless.
From what I understand, molestation within the family rarely strays outside, and it's uncommon that the offender does it again after (s)he's been found out. AFAIK, the scenario you paint doesn't reflect reality.
That's an interesting point. But who do you think would more likely to be on MySpace trolling for young girls?
I consider it milder mostly because it can sometimes be very hard to keep separate one kind of intimate relationship for another, especially if you were abused yourself as a child. I believe those cases are the ones most amenable to treatment. I also believe that the suicide rates among offenders in those kinds of cases are the highest. So, my definition of milder is mostly "least likely to actually be a danger to anybody else".
That's actually not true. The recidivism rate among sex offenders is very low compared to most crimes. And the likelihood could hardly be characterized as 'high' as I believe the rate is less than 1%.
Now, among certain classes of sex offenders this isn't true. But initiatives like this very rarely make any distinction and treat all sex offenders as the worst kind.
I can't see any reason not to make people like that register either. And having them show up on MySpace is just fine by me. Personally, I really hope that someone was very careful about things when they released them from prison.
I think most people would agree that kidnapping children and forcing them into sexual acts is worse than the statutory rape I cited or even a father molesting his daughter.
Sex offenders who violently take what they want by force might be worse than the kidnappers or not depending.
The statutory rape case IMHO hinges entirely on the individuals involved. I can see that being abusive or just fine. I, in fact, know of a case just like that in which both parties are now adults and are doing very well in a committed relationship.
And a simple stark reading of the charges someone is guilty of isn't actually sufficient to make a judgment either. It's all about intent, coercion, abuse of power and other factors.
Worse and far more damaging than someone who kidnaps children and forces them into child porn? I hope you're joking.
I do think it's milder than someone kidnapping children and forcing them into child porn. I don't think it's minor.
I think we are in the process of creating a bunch of second class citizens with sex offender registration laws. People can become sex offenders for a wide variety of reasons, but everybody treats all sex offenders as if each and every single one were an evil predator lurking and waiting for even a glimmer of a chance to prey on a child.
For people convicted of kidnapping children and coercing them into child porn, this might very well be reasonable. But for the 25 yr old convicted of statutory rape of the 17yr old, this is quite questionable. Or the father who molests his daughter (and has never touched another child), or any number of other situations that are significantly milder.
Most people who have to register do not deserve to be treated the same as the worst of the class.
I'm waiting for the laws that strip custody of children from registered sex offenders or prohibit them from participating in school events with their children, or any number of other laws passed by well-meaning people that create a large class (probably nearly a million people in the US) of people who are denied some fairly basic things for no particularly good reason.
Well, OK, it says "The Novell deal was really bad, really really bad. It's good for Microsoft. What SCO is doing is good for Microsoft. The Novell deal is like the SCO deal because they are both good for Microsoft. The Novell deal is really stupid and Novell should know better."
And while I agree, nobody is going to be convinced by that. I would appreciate some deeper level of analysis and explanation. Perhaps something I could use when talking to people about it about why the deal is a bad idea.
Yeah, because enforcing the law against a big company is somehow representative of big government and corporate influence at their worst. We should just let monopolies run rampant. That way we'll have a really excellent telecommunications infrastructure and software that improves over time and isn't subject to massive world spanning security breaches and... Oh, wait... We don't have any of these things, despite having largely not bothered with monopoly law enforcement in those industries. Well... Hmmm... I guess that failed then.
Actually, I guess I disagree with your statement that it won't get Novell any more business. Though, I think in aggregate they will lose business for PR reasons, I do think there are a few businesses who will choose Novell because they think patents are an important consideration.
In the perception game, they lose. Because for people who choose to think that the patent issue is important Novell is now a much better choice.
This is an interesting Real Politic analysis. And I think it is flawed in one important way. FOSS isn't about what a bunch of companies are doing. It's about what a bunch of developers are doing. This is a misperception many people have, and feeding it only serves to delay understanding.
This deal is good for Novell at the expense of everybody else. But, really, it's bad for Novell for that reason. Novell relies a heck of a lot more on software developed by others than its own software. It needs the goodwill in order to be able to move those external projects in directions it's happy with. Destroying that goodwill by entering into a deal that treats them preferentially is very, very bad.
They've tried to mitigate this by talking about getting Microsoft to promise never to sue individual developers. But what about RedHat? A good number of kernel developers work for RedHat. Those developers are now less inclined to help Novell.
So really, this deal represents a shortcut to getting what you want that will ultimately fail anyway.
I think there is overreaction, but I don't think it's to a ridiculous level.
The deal buys Microsoft nothing from a legal perspective. So, all the noise about patents is mostly about perception (which is all that problem is anyway) than reality. Novell screwed up majorly I think because they miscalculated and thought this would make the illusory patent problem better instead of much, much worse. The really irritating thing is that it makes it better for just them, but much, much worse for everybody else.
This also irritates the FSF enormously because it's a tactic that appears geared towards dividing people. And that's just evil by their definition and mine. They plan to make this kind of attempt to divide people a license violation in the GPLv3.
Now, some of the interesting bits involve Mono, J2EE and Novell's Exchange killer. I think these are all generally bad for the community as a whole. Mostly because Novell dropping work on the replacement for Exchange is bad for everybody. Since the details of the deal are not public, it's not possible to know if they did this as part of the deal or not, but it's a good guess that they did.
I really don't know what to make of the bits involving virtualization, Mono and J2EE.
Why not try to get the Russian government to cooperate in going after Russia based phishers, DDOS extortion rings and the like? It seems to me that would be a lot more useful to more people than asking them to shut down allofmp3.com.
Oh, right, the copyright cartel uses its ill-gotten gains to pay off politicians to do their bidding.
I think the direction the Tivo has gone with their hardware is ultimately bad for everybody, and specifically harmful to Free Software. It encourages all hardware manufacturers to make their hardware devices work in this way as it is more profitable to have detailed control over what your users do with what you 'sell' them. As an endpoint, this represents the effective death of Free Software as your ability to get hardware that will run it becomes increasingly restricted.
If Tivo wants to sell their devices at a profit, they are free to do so. There are many businesses that currently make a great deal of money selling people all kinds of hardware that doesn't have those restrictions in them. So whining about their ability to make money or run a viable business seems to me to be pathetic whining rather than a serious argument.
I run mostly free software. My one big concession is my Powerbook. My smaller concessions are games, which I think are more art than software and should be treated differently.
My workstation Linux box only runs proprietary software when I run certain games, and even most of the games I run are Open Source despite the fact that most of them have bad to mediocre art. My server Linux boxes run no proprietary software whatsoever. At one point I ran a Sybase instance for testing and development purposes, but I haven't done that in years.
My Powerbook runs the proprietary software that Apple distributes, but all the other software (aside from games) that I run on it is free.